John Marino published a ‘cheatsheet‘ (also, typo fix)for DragonFly 3.5 users who want to try dports, using DragonFly 3.4 packages.
John Marino has a concise explanation of why dports mostly uses gcc 4.4 still to compile, even if you’re building DragonFly itself with the default 4.7. It’s a reason to not use NO_GCC44 – yet.
Here’s a status report on the 3.4 release, pulled right from my mailing list post:
- We have the ability to use pkgsrc or dports (building from source in either case) now
- Several people have committed the remaining last-minute fixes
- I’m not going to have pkgsrc binaries built for the release.
- dports binaries – John Marino and Francois Tigeot are uploading now.
I’d like to have the release available with binary packages for dports immediately, because I anticipate a number of people wanting to try it out. So, the release will be delayed a few days while the packages upload.
DPorts is based off of FreeBSD’s ports, but it’s possible to add software packages to it that don’t exist in FreeBSD’s ports system and have them build as any other packages. This is briefly detailed in this GitHub bug report, along with a number of the ports that already exist that way.
Matthew Dillon wrote a note about SSDs, HDDs, and swapcache that may be useful for anyone building a system soon. Conversations about SSDs, swapcache, and so on have happened before.
Peter Avalos has updated ftp in DragonFly. It’s actually tnftp, which is the same base ftp client used in FreeBSD/NetBSD/Mac OS X/etc. It’s the 20121224 version, and the 3.4 release branch has it too.
The DragonFly page on the Summer of Code site is set up. If you are a potential mentor that I’ve talked to before, I’ve already sent you an email with details. If you are a potential mentor I haven’t talked to, you can email me or send a request via the DragonFly page. (Google has a new ‘connections’ method for signup this year.)
If you’re an interested student, take a look at the DragonFly Projects Page. Keep in mind that your proposal does not have to be one of those ideas – new projects are always welcome, and often have the advantage of being unique instead of being one of several similar proposals. (hint, hint)
We’re accepted! The application requirements, etc. will be up on the Google Summer of Code site as soon as I can fill out the forms.
The upcoming DragonFly 3.4 release will not include the USB4BSD port from Markus Pfeiffer; he’s hoping for it to become default in the next release after 3.4.
You can still try it, as it’s present in DragonFly but not on by default. Help with driver porting is always welcome, of course.
Constantine Aleksandrovich Murenin has put together a new site, bxr.su. His announcement to users@ goes into a lot of detail, but here’s a preview: it’s an OpenGrok site that has a forked version of OpenGrok that’s both speedy and takes BSD into account, along with other nice features.
Here’s the catch: it’s currently IPv6 only. IPv4 will be on as a test just today, and on for good shortly after. Read that announcement I mentioned for details.
John Marino has posted about the state of dports: over 19500 ports built, build logs available, and patches to add even more can be sent through github. XFCE4, KDE3, and KDE4 are building, though he could use some help with GNOME2.
Man, I’m stretching it to make that “Over nine thousand!” joke, now.
If you have a DragonFly 3.2 system and you want to try the 3.4 release candidate, you can delete your local source, edit the Makefile to pull down 3.4 instead of 3.2, and run it.
cd /usr
rm -rf src
vi /usr/Makefile;
(in vi) :%s/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_2/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4/g
(save, quit vi)
make src-create-shallow
… then proceed to make buildworld and so on, as normal.
The caveats: I haven’t tested this yet, and this assumes you don’t have any local changes in /usr/src that you want to save. The usual warnings about lighting your computer on fire, etc., apply.
The DragonFly Git repository of pkgsrc now has the 2013Q1 branch. You can switch to it by editing your /usr/Makefile (look for existing references to either pkgsrc master or pkgsrc-2012Q3) and using the normal commands.
If you have a mfi(4) device – in other words, a LSI MegaRAID SAS driver – you can now see/import/clear/etc. foreign configurations, thanks to this commit from Sascha Wildner, tested by Francois Tigeot, and originally from FreeBSD.
For the confused, ‘foreign’ means any disk hooked to a RAID controller that isn’t part of a configuration the RAID device already knows about. A replacement disk, or more worryingly, a good disk gone bad/unrecognizable. (I’ve had both.)
If you have an ath(4), wpi(4) or iwi(4) wireless network link, and you’re running DragonFly-master, please update. Sepherosa Ziehau has pushed Johannes Hoffman’s wlan_serialize branch, which means bringing up wlan0 is a bit easier – and less crashy.
It needs to be tested for wpi(4) and iwi(4), however, so if you have success or failure with those devices, please say so in reply.
(new post category starting now: “Please test”)
DragonFly 3.4 is branched – as a release candidate, with the current target for 3.4.0 release as the weekend of April 13-14. See the tagging commit note for a list of all the commit messages.
Note that in previous releases, we tagged “x.y.0” on branch, and “x.y.1” on release. I’m now tagging “x.y.0rc” for the release candidate at branch time, and we’ll tag with a more normal (to my ears) “x.y.0” for the release.
If you build a 3.4.0rc image right now, you’ll get an older quarterly release of pkgsrc. That’ll be changed tomorrow as the DragonFly pkgsrc git source is updated and I change where 3.4’s /usr/Makefile points.
The 2013Q1 branch of pkgsrc has been announced. Along with the normal quarterly material, there’s several notes: preliminary Cygwin support is present, ruby 1.8 will be retired in favor of 1.9 after this release, and the pkgsrc.org web page now has a very nice new look and logo.
I plan to branch DragonFly 3.4 very soon, and that version will have 2013Q1 as default.
Update: The 2013Q1 branch should be available by tomorrow on DragonFly’s git; the repository needs to update and convert from NetBSD’s CVS and that takes a little time. I’ll post when it’s ready.
I saw this Hacker News post and figured I should emphasize: pkgsrc is still going to be available in the 3.4 release of DragonFly; we’re not suddenly switching to dports. I don’t want anyone to think they’re going to have to rip out all their packages and go to a new, untried system, all at once.
If you were thinking, “Hey, I’d like to try an early version of DragonFly 3.4 before it’s released”, I’ll just point you at the recent daily snapshots of 3.3. These are close enough to a release candidate, I think.
The next release of DragonFly will be 3.4, and it’s probably going to be mid-April.